Humming birds/moths/Infrared tour

The Clearwing Hummingbird Moths have finally showed up to feast on the Bee Balm. Of course they generally show up on the hottest days of July, but if you wish to see them, you have to sit patiently and watch for them.

I was fairly far from the flowers... on the back step to the house which was in the shade. 

 Remember the crooked and ancient looking outhouse in March? It looked SO pitiful! 

Well, it looks like an aged old beauty right now. Maybe that is why I've kept from demolishing it.

I enjoy trying to 'catch' the hummingbirds doing their thing with the Bee Balm also.

This is 3 shots combined into one. 

Thankfully, the camera has an exceptional image stabilizer and ON1 allows for layers to be aligned when loaded!

I like to do these kinds of shots, they just seem so fun to look at. I think I'm going to do a bird calendar next year for all of my favorite birds shots from this year.

I can't wait to capture some action with some butterflies. I would hope to see some Swallowtails and Monarchs just because they are so incredibly beautiful.

Sunday morning I had to run an errand in town to pick up some milk and other 'stuff' you know, the stuff you forget the last time you shopped.

Since I went very early [hubby's early morning nap time], I took a little more time driving to town and back. I took my Infrared Camera with me. The fog here was dense and it had been such a l-o-n-g time since I'd been able to get out and admire the morning light and take some shots.

Along a ridge road --> a not shortcut road to town. The fog was so dense there was no sky but I thought the telephone/power poles made a neat shot with the road curving off into the distance.

The fog started to lift as I came through this ridge towards the county road that leads to the highway....that leads to town!

I just love the undulation of the different strips of crops and lines that the eyes wouldn't see in regular color.

Here the morning sun comes out on another cut across gravel road I took. 

A bit further down the road the sun came out peeked between clouds. I was following buggy tracks. The buildings on the left side of the road belong to a few Amish families. 

More photos taken on the way home from town on another gravel road between the highway and the county road. One of my favorite ways to go home.

This shot was taken on our road as I headed home with a cooler of ice cream and all sorts of good veggies to make cold meals of fruits and veggies. 

I had hoped to get some nice steaks. I looked at some steaks that I've purchased a month ago for $25 to $30 bucks. That would feed us 2 suppers and one lunch.

The sticker shock of $45.00 stopped me in my tracks. I won't be able to afford to eat beef! I picked up pork chops and chicken. 
Hubby is going to have to forgo eating steaks [which is what he is so into right now].

It makes me sad to think I let my little beefers go a few years ago. I am also thankful that our friend Steve has supplied us with some amazing fish and venison.

The sky and ridge as I turned onto one of our gravel roads.

And then....

down this lane and into the woods to our place....

All these shots were done with a camera that was modified to take Infrared photos with different 
filters of different wave lengths. I use the 665nm filter for all shots. 
I normally take this camera out a lot when driving to and from places when

there is an interesting sky. 

Today is supposed to be blistering hot so I did all the chores before 7am and even did my last bit of mowing with my little mower. Boy that mower hated the wet tall grass, but I got it done, cleaned the mower, and put it away.

Upstairs and experimenting

I really didn't want to move the bed in the tiny tiny room because to vacuum under it requires jiggling, lifting, this way and that and then moving the heavy bed a bit more one way and then the other way just to get under it and kill the dust monsters that lurk on the carpet under the bed.

While I was at it, I washed the walls down and changed the bedding.
It was snowing outside and it sounded like hail at the same time.

The weather was nuts. High winds, snow, then sunshine with snow and sunshine with glorious light.
And back to snow.

I stopped and looked through a forgotten album that had photos of my boys in it. It was a mix of dates stuck in a book so that I wouldn't lose them. The photos brought a smile to my face as I sat cross legged and looked through them slowly.

I eventually got back to work and had another bag of 'stuff' to get rid of. If I haven't used something in a long time I need to move it out.

I found a cheap piece of black plastic that I'd used a few times to make reflections with Still Life. I noticed that my hands actually were reflected when I reached for something.
And then I thought.
I wonder if I could take a photo of the reflection of my hands??

There was enough light coming in through the window to give an eerie glow to portions of my skin.

Remember, this is a reflection of my hands palm up towards the window.

So I liked this in a way because it was so different.

I decided to start trying different things with it. I discarded what I was working on and made my own texture and added text to it.

This was the end result of messing around.
I got to here and stopped.

I sat back and then closed the program.

I was done and the image stuck with me. It invoked something I couldn't quite describe, but it felt right.

It was a good experiment for how I'd felt off an on for the past couple of weeks.

ON1 10.5 and ONRAW2017

I'm always looking for ways to touch up a photo in a fast an easy sort of manner. I don't like wild over editing, although I will plead guilty to doing it when I feel extremely creative.

I discovered ON1 Effects Free a year or so ago and installed it. I enjoyed playing around with it and then tried the 90 day trial of ON1 10.5. I found I was able to take .RAW files and edit them in the 10.5 version and I really enjoyed the ease of use.
When my 90 days were up, I bought the program.

This was a photo I did in 10.5:

I am not a huge fan of photographing buildings, but each year when I go to the Range to practice for work and Qualify, I go past this church.
I happen to really love photographing this little building.
I thought a vintage look would be fun.
So yes, this would be 'over-edited' but for my creative juices only.

I also sometimes like to work in layers. Imagine how pleased I was that I could layer and mask easily in both ON1 programs.

I normally wouldn't be altering a photo like this and adding extra textures to it, but I thought it would be nice to show how easy it really is to do in ON1.

Here is the original shot.

And then the peeling paint texture added:

I used "Overlay" and lightened it a bit in a layer above the photo, then use a handy little Bug Tool to keep the cup and beads from having the texture.

It was an interesting experiment.
Seriously? I like the plain and straight forward photo myself.

However, this series of edits only took me a few minutes to do. Which is the beauty of this program.
I also didn't have to take hours of Photoshop courses in order to learn how to do it.
I did review how to use this program from a few "Short Clips" from ON1.

I have to admit, I do enjoy being able to be more 'creative' with ON1, at least I can do it all in once place and do it quickly.

I absolutely adore how I can edit my Still Life work.

Light Play

I couldn't resist taking some time in the afternoon day to set up my Creative Room of Wonders stuff and try some things out.

Morris had to help of course.
I thought I'd take a shot of what I was doing and the simple things that I set up in the spare bedroom to play with the camera and some lights.

So at first I used the method of trying to get a nearly black backround with just the settings in the camera.
It wasn't hard.

I referenced this article by Glyn Dewis: The Invisible Black Blackdrop Photography Technique.

I didn't totally want the backdrop to be black because I don't have the flash equipment. I thought I'd experiment with his idea and see what I could do.

I moved the exposure so that the photo was nearly black. Then I put my camera on a 2 second delay and used an LED flash light to try and light up the flowers from different angles.

There is my hand right there holding up the flash light.

I took several shots and then put them through my old CS2 photomerge.
This is an archiac way of doing things similar to photo stacking and using 'light painting' at the same time. I was able to mask out my hand and then crop the photo.

I ended up with the following.

Well that was nothing to actually write home about. But, I did get an interesting combined shot. It was worth exploring some more.

I did the same thing with some toys.

This was actually quite fun. The hard part is getting a strong enough flashlight and lighting up the right areas. The above shot is probably 4 or 5 shots combined.

Then I thought, why not use a lamp?

Well I did have fun and I was able to edit out the lamp with masking tools.
However I didn't really think I ended up with anything brilliant here either.

So I took this photo into ON1 10.5 for some fun.
Much better...

I then went back to the other flower photo and decided if I could do anything more impressive.
Not sure if this fits that bill or not.
I would need to totally redo this shot as I missed lighting up the top flower and I think no amount of fiddling or editing will fix that.
But I did learn something important about light painting. Don't move the camera until you have reviewed all of the shots.

However, I did go into back to just concentrating on a nice shot of the blue and white cup.
But of course I came up with 3 versions.

When I get some free time, it looks like it is back to the drawing board for me!

Rib Mountain State Park and some fun

One of my goals in going to Wausau, aside from visiting with the grand kids, was to explore Rib Mountain State Park.


I like hills, I like rocks.  I like geology.
Rib Mountain, formerly called Rib Hill, is a four mile-long ridge of ancient rock dating back about 1.7 billion years. It is among the oldest geological features on earth. It is composed of very hard metamorphic rock called quartzite.
As early as 1893, the mountain was used in the manufacture of sandpaper. The Wausau Sandpaper Company was incorporated in 1900 and built a factory. In 1902, Wausau Quartz Company crushed the quartzite for grinding and polishing purposes. The two companies merged in 1905 to form Wausau Abrasives, which was purchased by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing in 1929.
From Rib Mountain History.

Friday it stopped raining and we decided to go.  Lily and I got dressed for the weather and got to Rib Mountain quite early.  We were the only vehicle at the very end of the parking areas.
One of the first things we did was to climb the 60 foot tower and take a look around us.

Lily took a shot with my FujiFilm camera and was able to see our motel. There is a pink circle around the Motel 8 sign.
The hotel was about 5 miles away, just so you can get a perspective on it.

The view was really quite neat even with the heavily overcast skies.

Parachute People flung off the tower at some point in time.

Lily's dad along with Elena and Sterling were to join us at the park.  Lily and I decided to go ahead and do a bit of exploring while we were waiting for them to come.

Lily got along just fine with my P&S FujiFilm camera.  We started along the Blue Trail which stayed close enough to the tower we climbed but not so far that we couldn't go back to the parking lot and meet up with her dad.

We swapped over to the Red Trail and circled back towards the Blue Trail.

What we had been looking for was the Grey trail which was my goal.  The grey trail would take us to the old quarry.  But we didn't find that trail until we were ready to leave.

We actually didn't hike very far, we found so many interesting things to look at like fungi, moss, rocks and of course acorns.

Taking a ten year old hiking is a much different experience than taking an older person.  It is more fun to see things through a young person's eyes.

When we got to a stone staircase we decided to try some fun photography.

First the stairway.

Lily wanted to see what it would look like in Infrared.  So I set it up.

Then I asked her to be in the shot and to stand absolutely still.  She wanted a spooky weird shot.

And there she was, a ghostly figure in a strange looking land.

We had so much fun with that, she wanted a IR photo of the two of us on a bench.

Our cam colors came out white and it was sort of spooky and creepy looking.

After exploring some mossy rocks and other things we headed back to the playground in hopes of meeting up with her dad.

We played on the Merry go Round and then I set up a camera on a tripod and had some more fun with 'trick' photography.

By 2:30 PM we decided to vacate the mountain and promised each other to come back and explore it again.

We went to her dad's place and visited.